


love is a war of lightning

by taureel



Category: The Flash (TV 2014), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, I think there might even be some Iris West/Speed Force in here idek, Non-Linear Narrative, a lot of it like even I was surprised, and moderate amounts of Fluff, but is probably already an AU, it went from a character study of Iris West to some kind world building Flash Mythos for the show, oh and angst, plot holes what plot holes, tries very hard not to completely diverge from Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-28 17:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3863176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taureel/pseuds/taureel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her body hums with knowledge and with some intimate entity (<i>home</i>, it whispers). She can taste lightning and space and something infinite on the tip of her tongue. The sensation isn’t a jolt, it’s not painful or numbing – it feels like coming alive. </p><p>(or the story of Iris West, Barry Allen, and the Speed Force)</p>
            </blockquote>





	love is a war of lightning

**Author's Note:**

> "Love is a war of lightning,  
> and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness."  
> \- Pablo Neruda

Her body is trembling and in some distant part of her mind she recognizes the symptoms of shock, had studied it in the Neuropsychology course she took the last year of her Bachelor’s degree. Her mind is racing with treatments, _“You must first focus on the physical symptoms, get their breathing and their heart rate steady. Afterwards, you can gently examine the patient’s emotional trauma – it is important for treatment that they learn to process and regulate their strong emotions”_ , but she’s as detached from the experience now as she was learning about it in Dr. Wolster’s stale lecture hall.

Barry is the Flash.

She _knows_ he’s the Flash, she _knows_ it like she _knows_ so many things about him, can feel it in the very foundation of her bones.

Barry is the Flash and he never told her.

With a shaking breath, she feels her legs give out under her for the second time and there is no Flash – there is no Barry, she reminds herself because _oh, God Barry is the Flash_ – to keep her steady this time. The cold concrete bites at her sore shins, but the sensation is as lost to her as the tears that have stopped streaming down her face. She can see the water below her as it dances to the wailing wind’s movements while the silent city stretches before her, dark and sharp in its clarity.

She’s alone. She’s been left alone on a deserted bridge surrounded only by her own tumultuous emotions and the otherworldly hum that’s beginning to deafen her ears.

Iris tastes lightning and she _knows_.

 

–  
–

 

_There is a voice that whispers in her dreams sometimes. It’s not human, it’s not kind or warm or hurt, it only is. It’s a voice she feels like she’s heard a hundred (a thousand) times before and yet one that’s a stranger to her. It’s a voice that knows her, though, and it whispers to her longingly._

_“Home… Iris.”_

 

–  
–

 

S.T.A.R Labs is a sterile and cold environment filled with so many gadgets and so much metal that she sometimes forgets there are other people around. Well, 3 other people actually. The void of laughter and of life in the large, looming hallways only reinforces the lack of warmth Iris feels when she walks into the building. This is not where she wants to leave Barry.

Barry is a scientist and he loves the cold and clinical experiments as much as any other scientist, but Barry is also her best friend. Iris knows that despite his profession, despite how awkward he can become about it all, that he is full of a warmth and love that is missing from this place. Barry’s own lab is a patchwork of equipment he refuses to throw away and that Iris and Joe have bought for him over the years, it’s cluttered with notes and their photos and everywhere you look you can see evidence of someone having lived in that room.

Yet, despite her reservations, this is where he needs to be now. Iris no longer has to listen to the blaring of a machine warning that she was about to lose her best friend again. She’s finally stopped running away from his bedside, tears spilling down her face and her sobs carrying down the halls. Barry looks stronger here and Iris can feel stronger here as well.

She tries her best to instill some warmth in the room, leaving fresh flowers and Barry’s (and her) favorite photo of them on the table next to him. The photo helps her focus on bad days when she can’t really form words and her eyes drift away because she can’t stare at him too long, unmoving and pale, looking so lifeless.

On good days, she can chatter away about anything, scared that Barry was aware of everything and that he was alone in the darkness of his coma. She knows that truthfully the talking helps her more than it helps him. Her topics are usually light, she keeps to the most surface level of interactions with him, aware that Caitlin and Cisco were close by, watching and judging her even if they didn’t mean to. She knows this isn’t what they expected they would be doing after building one of the greatest (and the faultiest) inventions ever known. If she had any empathy left in her, she would feel sorry for them. Right now, she’s only trying her hardest not to blame them. She owes them so much.

She manages to keep this up for a few months before Detective Pretty Boy asks her out on a date. She’s agreed before she’s really thought it through and he’s already walking away with a spring in his step before she can call after him and take it back. She’s been distracted and tired and _lonely_ and she knows why she’s said yes, but it doesn’t make it any wiser of a choice than before.

When she’s sitting in front of Barry, telling him about her mistake and ready to laugh this off as well, she breaks. She can feel it as soon as the words are out of her mouth and she starts thinking of a lifetime of making mistakes without Barry around to stop her. She can feel herself start to understand what a lifetime without Barry will look like and it breaks her.

Her family was incomplete before Barry and she’s not half of a whole or a broken piece by any imaginations, but there was a part of her that grew with him, too. He made them a family under the worst of circumstances and they couldn’t lose him now. She doesn’t know _how_ to lose him, yet.

_“We need you.”_

_“I need you.”_

She hasn’t really touched him since the night of the particle accelerator when she hugged him goodbye. Her father holds Barry’s hand and pats his shoulder goodbye when he leaves after his visits, but Iris couldn’t bring herself to touch him when she knows he won’t respond. Barry always responds to her and she couldn’t bear it if he didn’t, it would feel real and it would feel permanent.

She’s past the point of deluding herself now. She’s already broken and a touch won’t widen those cracks any further.

She reaches for him, her hand hovering an inch above his own when she feels the electricity travel from him to her. Her fingers feel tender and her nerves are frayed, the current traveling throughout her body until she feels like she’s buzzing in her seat. She knows her expression is one of shock and when she looks up to look at his face again, she can almost convince herself that he’s not as pale as before.

The current was familiar and it was alive. It was an answer.

It was Barry.

 

–  
–

 

_Iris can feel the warm, spring sunshine bathing her face in light. There’s an arm wrapped around her waist and a comforting presence behind her. She can’t remember how she got where she is or why the bed beneath her seemed so familiar, but she can recognize the warm emotion surrounding her. She feels loved and she feels happy._

_There’s some shifting behind her, the arm around her waist dragging her closer to whoever is behind her. There’s the touch of bare skin on bare skin and her heart rate picks up._

_She can hear a chuckle from behind her and a sleepy (familiar, oh so familiar) voice calls for her to wake up._

_“Iris.”_

She wakes up in her college dorm, her face stuck to the criminology textbook she fell asleep on and her cellphone dead after so many hours of listening to Barry breathe and work 4000 miles away from her. Her head feels like it’s full of cotton and she can’t shake the feeling of a wedding ring, steady and solid, on her ring finger for the rest of the day.

 

–  
–

 

She’s not angry.

Okay she’s a little angry, but she’s trying very hard not to be because it’s Barry and honestly what did she expect leaving him in charge of time management. This whole predicament, this whole wasted day and outfit, this dejected feeling of missing out on what’s supposed to be the most exciting thing to happen to Central City in forever, all of it was really her fault. She was pretty sure Barry Allen would be late for his own funeral if the Grim Reaper wasn’t there to make him get a move on. She lets herself chuckle at the thought of mostly logical, science-loving Barry Allen dealing with the Grim Reaper and then she lets out an even louder laugh at the thought of the poor Grim Reaper having to deal with Barry Allen.

Her dress slips from her shoulders as she’s still laughing, ending up in a pile next to her barely worn heels that she purchased just for this day because her best friend was ridiculously tall ( _just like his mother_ , she won’t let herself think until it’s too late and she’s halfway through a bottle of wine). She’s already shimmying into more comfortable clothes, ready to go and keep Barry company at work because he must feel worse about this than even she does, when the air around her stills.

She had never realized how much everything around her moved, how alive all of it was until this moment – until it was gone.

An abrupt pulse cuts through the rigid atmosphere and her heart starts racing as sound finally reaches her buzzing ears, an explosion so loud she can feel the house rock beneath her sock clad feet. She rushes to Barry’s old room, the one that framed the Central City skyline like it was a painting you could find answers in. Her breath was stuck in her lungs, the air still so stagnant and unforgiving.

She feels herself sharply exhale, the air still burning in her lungs ( _move, move, move, already_ ). The sky is on fire and everything is eerily silent, the terrifying calm before a storm she knows will rock this city to the ground. There are tears already pulling at her eyes as her trembling fingers grab her cellphone, ready to call her Dad or Barry or both of them because what if something happened, _oh God what if something happened_.

She can’t stop shaking long enough to dial the numbers, her own frustration at herself making her movements clumsy and unpredictable. With a shuddering sigh, she shuts her eyes, closes them so tight she can see stars behind her lids. Stops herself from zoning in on the screams, the sirens, and the crying that’s suddenly burst into the outside world. The world is devastated and it is still alive.

She almost drops her phone when it starts ringing in her hand, time lost to her in this brave, new world. She brings it to her ear without any greeting, scared of what they’ll say, of what will now be real to her.

“Iris, this is Captain Singh, you have to go Central City Hospital. No questions, okay, I don’t have time,” the Captain’s voice is harried, “Barry was struck by lightning and I can’t reach Joe. He’s in critical condition and…”

The air that lays heavy and sour in her lungs won’t move for nine more months.

 

–  
–

 

_Her world is collapsing, people and objects blinking out of existence faster than she can catalogue and she knows with a certainty she can’t explain that she’ll be here at the end of it all, that edge of transformation when everything’s gone and changed and she’s different. Her world is different._

_It’s only when it changes like this that she can remember other timelines so vividly, her mind and her soul caught in the Speed Force and it’s harsh grip on reality. She can remember other Iris’ and other Barry’s and she can remember how exactly timelines were destroyed by his actions and she knows he can’t. He’ll always be there for the effects and he’ll always come back to her when it’s all done, but he’s never here to see how it all changes, to see how it’s all destroyed._

_As she feels her memories shifting, feels herself being strung out thought for thought in this red ether, and filled to the brim again – Iris holds onto the thought of Barry, her memories of him slowly slipping like sand between her fingers. She’s crying, reliving each memory over again before they’re lost to her and she’s hoping against hope that Barry will make it this time, that he’ll get here before it’s all destroyed and not after, that he won’t stop loving her and that she won’t lose him again. Not again._

_He’s always just a little bit too late._

_“You don’t remember anything, either?”_

_“No… not really. It feels like I just woke up from a dream… a vivid dream that suddenly faded from memory.”_

 

–  
–

 

The first time she sees Barry Allen, she’s seething with a barely controlled jealousy.

It’s the first day of preschool and her father had been called away by work – he was always gone – and her frail, elderly neighbor Mrs. Rodriguez had offered to drop her off instead. Mrs. Rodriguez had no children and her husband had gone away for a long rest last year.

Iris could still remember the first day she rode her new tricycle down to Mrs. Rodriguez’s home and found the old woman in her garden crying into soiled hands, the ripped remains of tulips surrounding her like a protective circle. She remembered Mr. Rodriguez meticulously planting them before he left and before he started coming outside less and less. He looked so surprised and proud when he finished planting them that Iris had wanted to ask him why he would start something he was so surprised to finish. She would have asked him if her father hadn’t put his hand on her shoulder and given her the look that promised her he would explain it all later when they got home.

He never would explain.

Iris liked to imagine that her mom would have explained everything, and that she would be like the moms on sleepy Sunday morning television with their soft smiles and their caring eyes. Iris liked to imagine her mom a lot because it was the only time she could talk to her.

It was with thoughts of her ( _gone, gone, gone_ ) mother and father, with Mrs. Rodriguez’s weak words about behaving well and being kind still drifting through her ears, that she saw Barry Allen for the first time. His bright red shirt shone like a beacon and she could only see the back of his unruly head as he talked to a tall, red headed lady in front of him. Iris knew she was his mother because Iris could always tell if someone was a mom, it constantly seemed like the absence of her own mother only made it easier for her to see them.

The boy with the wild, dark hair had a good mom, one whose face was brilliant with love and happiness, even if her eyes were a little red and shiny. She watched as the woman gently fell to her knees to hug the boy so tightly Iris was beginning to wonder how he could breathe, before she finally let go. The boy hadn’t let go of her, though, and Iris felt something clench painfully somewhere in the middle of her chest as she watched the woman hug him tightly again.

When the woman had finally managed to untangle herself from her son, she stood once again and gave him a small push to the door of the classroom. Iris stood frozen under the warm August sun, surrounded by other crying children and equally worried parents as she listened to the woman shout goodbye to her _beautiful boy_ and it felt like something in her would never melt. Not even if she stayed outside long enough to roast her dark skin, to feel the sharp little knives of a sunburn under her flesh and the waves of harsh heat that would radiate from it.

 

–  
–

 

Her dreams are worse when he’s gone. She’d never noticed before. She’d never lost him before.

_… but that was a lie, she’s lost him so many times – in so many ways._

 

–  
–

 

_The air in her lungs is as vicious as the wind whipping around her, she's surrounded in a tornado of hair and the cries of different families scrambling to their cars - to safety. She would join them if the safest thing about her world wasn't currently running in front of her, his grip tight across her own frozen fingers._

_Iris can feel how monumental this moment is before Barry even turns to her, his eyes wide and pleading before any words even leave him._

_Her head is shaking before she can start formulating any sentences, the words turning over and over in her head like they have been for days, for weeks, for months. When she's being honest with herself, something she knows has been hard for her ever since she realized her mother was never coming back, that she wasn't enough for her father when his sadness overcame him, that Barry was slowly slipping away between her clenched fists; when she's being honest with herself, she recognizes these words as the same ones that have turned in her thoughts for years._

_Her words are rushed and broken, her stare earnest and she hopes that Barry can still read her face like the open book it always is (was, her mind whispers) for him, that he can read how much she means everything she's hurrying to tell him. She can't lose him until he knows, she refuses to._

_"I realized that the reason I couldn’t stop thinking about you was because I didn’t want to."_

_She can see the moment he understands what her clumsy words have been trying to say, what exactly she's still so scared of saying out loud to him. Everything has always been so much more real, so much more intimidating with him. It's like a dam has broken in his guarded eyes and she almost loses her breath at the amount of warmth and love he shows her. His smile is slow to take over, like he's so busy cataloguing this moment that reacting is the last thing he can do._

_"I've never stopped thinking about you."_

_Her answering smile is stopped by the crush of his lips on her and the cacophony of waves hitting the beaten shore next to them is nothing compared to the rushed beating of her heart at that moment._

There are phantom breaths on her lips the day she wakes up from that dream, her fingers itching to grab onto something (itching for _safety_ ), and the dream slipping like silk from her thoughts. Her own voice ( _ _I couldn’t stop thinking about you, _ _I couldn’t stop thinking about you__ ) __still plays over again and again in her head, transposed on top of the earth shattering ones Barry said to her in Jitters weeks ago.

She wonders if lightning psychosis is contagious.

 

–  
–

 

It’s dark when she wakes up gasping, the wind howling like a deserted wolf outside her window. Her mind is still foggy with sleep, but she has a feeling – an incessant, significant feeling – like something is going to happen. She’s scared it might have already happened.

Her body is humming with knowledge (but how does she _know_?) and with some intimate entity ( _“Home”_ , it keeps whispering in her ear, _“Iris.”_ ). She can taste lightning and space and something infinite on the tip of her tongue. Her world is hanging on the precipice of something life changing and Iris is awake for it.

She doesn’t think it’s a coincidence she’s awake.

When the air shifts and she feels the difference in the night ( _“In your timeline”_ , something else whispers this time) the sensation isn’t a jolt, it’s not painful or numbing – it feels like coming alive. She can feel the electric shock run through her body and she knows the event’s happened. She can feel someone’s anger and their grief, _their overwhelming grief_ , but she’s suddenly scared and she can’t reach out – she won’t reach out now.

Through her fear, she can hear her father’s phone ringing, can hear him practically jump out of his bed and into the clothes he kept by his bedside (her father was always ready to _leave, leave, leave_ ). She can hear him talking as he walks past her room and she knows the news must have been too jarring for him to forget about “protecting” her.

“The Allen’s house? Are you sure?” the pain in her dad’s voice was strong and Iris suddenly felt it was difficult to breathe. It was like all sides of her room were suffocating her and her ears hurt, they were buzzing so much.

Steadily, she slid out of her bed and went to the top of the stairs. She could see her father’s headlights move down the driveway, leaving elongated shadows behind in her living room. The shadows looked like they were reaching for her and Iris ran to her father’s bedroom before they could catch her. She couldn’t help the shadows, she did not how to.

When she wakes up again, it's bright outside and there is the sound of an engine stalling in her driveway. She slowly pads her way through the silent house, free of shadows and clutter in the morning light. The door opens as she reaches the bottom of the staircase and standing in front of her is her best friend.

Her broken best friend.

Iris runs and she envelops Barry in the strongest hug she has in her body. She holds him as he cries into her shoulder and doesn’t wince when his nails dig into her back from holding her so tight.

She’s forgotten why his grief filled whimpers of “My mom, she’s… she can’t be. I want to go _home, Iris_ ” make her feel so light headed.

 

–  
–

 

_“You’re my lightning rod,” he mumbles into the crook of her neck, his fingers skimming down her sides. The hem of her nightgown has ridden up and she’s past the point of caring._

_She’s giggling because he knows how ticklish she is, that asshole. She’s also incredible turned on and this is all very unfair._

_"Excuse me, I’m your what?” she manages to retort, her nails gently raking up and down his back. If she’s a little breathless, he’s not going to comment on it._

_“My lightning rod, well more accurately my emotional lightning rod,” he states as his lips skim her jaw, catching her bottom lip for a moment to suck softly before escaping back down to her breasts. If he wasn’t hiding a very poorly concealed smirk right now and an even more poorly concealed erection, Iris would think he was almost casual about it all._

_“Whenever I push myself to my limits, when I can feel the Speed Force drawing me in, I think of you,” his mouth grazes her right breast and he looks up at her for a moment. Iris is doing her best to keep a straight face throughout all of this, but she can’t quite keep the grin from stretching her lips. His answering grin is adoring and she can feel it when his mouth finally wraps around her hard nipple. Her answering moan does nothing to make it go away._

_He’s slowly kissing his way lower, his teeth grazing her hipbone as he settles between her legs, when he starts talking again. Iris is ready to burst with frustration now, her nerves strained and singing for release._

_“Sometimes I can remember whole memories and other times I have to work just for your name, but I always remember you and I’ll always come back to you,” she can feel her breath catch and it’s at his words now rather than his actions._

_He’s stopped all his movements to look her in the eye, the fastest man in the world holding himself so still over her body that she can feel him vibrating with the need to fidget. Her hands clasp behind his head and she’s pulling his head back up to her, she lets herself pause for a second before kissing him, she swears sometimes she can feel the weight of these moments around them in the air, can feel the small tremors now working their way down his spine. Can feel her heart fracture from a love so saturating and painful that she doesn’t know, can never begin to know, how it manages to keep so much of it in._

_“I would be lost without you, too,” she’ll whisper over his heart later, their hands threaded together on his chest._

 

–  
–

 

She doesn’t know why she’s crying. When she was younger, when she let herself think things like “Barry Allen and boyfriend”, she thought the moment he confessed his love to her would be the greatest moment of her life.

She never thought she would give anything for him to take it all back. She never thought, even then when he could barely wake up to his alarm and his shirt was inside out more times than not as he ran downstairs in a hurry for school, that he would be too late.

_“I love you Iris. When we were kids I loved you before I even knew what the word love meant.”_

Iris tries to ease her breathing, to calm her heart rate, and to wipe her face clean. She tries to make herself presentable because someone was going to walk into this room soon – please not Eddie, please – and she would either have to be okay or have a good explanation for why she looked like her world was ending. Again.

Her breath catches with that thought and she runs upstairs to lock herself in her room, she needs time and she’s had so much time, but it’s not enough, it’s never enough. She grew up and over her crush, she let herself put those feelings to rest when they were so obviously unrequited time and time again ( _“Look, there were so many times that I wanted to tell you: junior prom, when I went away to college, when I came back from college, the nights that we stayed up talking, all the birthdays, all the Christmases. But I never did, I just- I kept it in.”_ ) and she was content with her place in Barry’s life.

She was happy with her life, with how Barry filled it then and when she lost him…

The air is thick around her and it feels like she’s caught in the middle of a tornado. When she lost him there was a void in her life, when she lost him she lost a part of herself and she needed something to block it out, not to replace it because it could never be replaced, but something to ease that tall, gangly space.

She knows that something is Eddie. She _knows_ why this is the longest relationship she’s ever had, there are no delusions there, but she also knows she loves Eddie – that there is a fondness there that helped her through her pain and that’s still supporting her now even when Barry is back.

The spaces in her life are jagged and they don’t fit anymore. Eddie has temporarily blocked the void left by Barry’s coma, but it’s still there and eating at her. Barry’s awake, but he hasn’t filled it again. His edges are raw now and they scrape against her when she tries to get close, when she tries to be what they were. There’s something else, something darker over their heads that’s stopping them from fitting and she can’t jump headfirst now. She needs to keep her head on straight and she needs to avoid more pain.

_“After I lost my mom & my dad, I was afraid that if you didn’t feel the same way… I would lose you, too. That’s the irony, I was so scared of losing you, that I did.”_

She lost him first. She wonders if he even knows that now.

 

–  
–

 

_Her fingers impatiently held the little plastic stick away from her. Willing the universe and time to go faster. If only her husband’s powers could speed time up instead of slow it down._

_Actually, that was an intriguing thought. If time was temporal enough in the Speed Force that his perception of it could be slowed down then wouldn’t it make sense that he would also be able to speed his perception of it up as well?_

_“Hey Bar, come in here!”_

_Her husband had been compulsively cleaning and re-cleaning the house for the last 10 minutes and she was pretty sure that her window was being scrubbed into fiber glass at this point._

_“Not now Iris, I’m really busy and – oh God, Barry don’t think about it – and the house has to be really clean especially if you really are – no, don’t think about it! Where are the supervillains when you need them for once?” could be heard coming from her attic and if Iris thought he was going to be any help before, she had lost all hope in that now._

_“Okay, well old fashioned waiting it is then,” she murmured to herself. She could do a lot of things to keep busy like go over her interview with Lex Luthor again to see if she could find any clues about his real intentions with the new Superhero Bill or even go make a sandwich if she wasn’t so terrified of sliding to her death on the (obsessively) clean floors._

_If she was… well, if she was that then maybe she could also think of some names while she waited. Allen was a pretty easy name to match with so she didn’t have to worry about being limited there, but Iris had never been the type to think this far ahead before. She was starting at ground zero right now._

_She heard a muffled crash and a loud shriek from her husband somewhere underneath their house – how did he even get under there? – and with an exasperated sigh, Iris turned to the window to yell some common sense at him. She stopped when she looked out at the gentle sunrise in front of her, her fingers tightening around the little test as she felt the dawn of a new day hit her._

_The timer went off and Iris Ann West-Allen was ready to know._

 

–  
–

 

“Hi, I’m Iris Ann West. Do you mind if I join you?”

She could feel the very tips of her ears getting warm while she waited for the boy to stop floundering for words before he finally cleared his squeaky throat and ran his hand through his hair, making it stick up even higher. He looked like an electrified fish and Iris was trying very hard not to laugh at him.

“Thank you, no wait that’s not what I meant! I meant yes! Um, you can play with me,” the boy was squinting his eyes now like he wanted the earth to pull him under, “My name’s Barry Allen?”

He nervously held his hand out for her to shake and Iris reached forward to grasp it. She was ready to ask him how he could be confused about his own name and if they should ask the teacher to help him remember it, before she yelped and grabbed her hand back away from him. Barry was staring at his own hand in astonishment for a moment before he looked back up at her with an excited grin, confident for the first time since she’d met him.

“That was static electricity, I read about it in one of the science books my mom bought for me,” he exclaimed, messing up a few times on the pronunciation of electricity, “It’s a charge of something, I don’t know what actually that part was very confusing, but the current was on me and then it moved to you when we touched. That was so cool!”

Iris could still feel a phantom tingle on her palm, the skin of her hand felt raw and stretched like the time she’d accidentally touched the oven when it was on, and she rubbed at it harshly like it was an itch she could erase. With a huff she muttered, “Well, whatever it was I don’t ever want to feel it again.”

**Author's Note:**

> This behemoth of a character study is a little more supernatural than I think the show will go, but it was really interesting finding a way to connect the comic canon to the show canon in a terribly bastardized fashion. For this story in particular, I like to imagine the Speed Force as kind of like the Force in Star Wars. It's something that exists on this plane and that can be accessed by a select few directly (the speedsters) or indirectly (the Vibe), but that the majority of the population is unaware of. I put in my own head canon that as a lightning rod to a speedster, Iris will be more aware of the Speed Force than the average person, even if she cannot actually access it.
> 
> The scenes in italic can be read as scenes that occurred in alternate timelines that Iris remembers as she dreams and also as scenes that haven't occurred yet in current canon. That's the great thing about time travel, really.
> 
> This wasn't beta'd and written pretty hurriedly because I really wanted to get it down before I lost the tone of it, so please excuse the quality. I'll proof read it later when my head isn't full of mush.
> 
> Reference Material/Quotes Used:  
> 1 https://jrphoel.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/flash17-c.jpg  
> 2 http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121208135430/marvel_dc/images/e/ed/Iris_West_0001.jpg  
> 3 The Flash S01E09 “The Man in the Yellow Suit”  
> 4 The Flash S01E15 "Out of Time"  
> 5 The Flash S01E20 “The Trap”


End file.
